Netflix will raise monthly subscription rates by $1 or $2 for new subscribers to help beef up its selection of shows like "House of Cards" and "Orange is the New Black," the company said Monday.

The last time Netflix changed prices in 2010, the Los Gatos company stumbled badly, prompting angry subscribers to bolt and wary investors to send its stock into a months-long tailspin.

This time, CEO Reed Hastings is trying to soften the landing. In a letter to investors issued with Netflix's quarterly earnings report, Hastings said the company would raise fees later this quarter for new subscribers, but keep existing U.S. subscribers "grandfathered in" at current levels, which start at $7.99 per month.

However, in the letter, Netflix would only guarantee that existing subscriber rate for an unspecified "generous time period." In an earnings interview broadcast on YouTube, Hastings said the grandfathering time might be one or two years.

"If we want to continue to expand, to do more great original content, more series, more movies, we have to eventually increase prices a little bit," Hastings said.

"We're not doing much, we're doing a dollar or two depending on the country, all existing subscribers keep their current price, they don't get an increase," he said.

Hastings said the company is considering ways to expand its current pricing tiers, which currently rise to $11.99 per month, to allow subscribers to watch as many as four streaming shows on multiple devices. One option could be to charge different rates for standard and high-definition streams, Hastings said.

Netflix raised fees for new members in Ireland in January from the equivalent of $9.65 to $11 and "as expected we saw limited impact," Hastings said in the letter to investors.

The price increase could stop binge-watchers from treating Netflix like a video rental store, as anyone who signed up and canceled would face the higher monthly fee when their show returns for a new season. But Hastings said with increases of a "dollar or two, I don't think that's a huge difference."

For now, he said, "we want to get this done well, we want to make sure we get this grandfathered cleanly."

Netflix posted higher first-quarter net income of $53.1 million on revenue of $1.28 billion, compared with a net loss of $1.8 million on revenue of $1 billion in the same quarter a year ago.

The second season of the award-winning series "House of Cards," which debuted in February, helped increase the total of streaming service subscribers to 48.4 million, including 35.7 million in the U.S. and 12.7 million in other countries.

But the costs of expansion in Europe "will keep our expanded international segment at a net loss," Hastings said. "We intend to continue our international expansion over the coming years, so our near-term profits will be quite modest as we invest in this large global community."

Netflix also forecast overall subscriber growth would tail off considerably due to a normal second-quarter slowdown. Netflix projected it would add only 1.46 million members this quarter, compared with the 1.24 million added during the previous second quarter.

Netflix is one of the momentum stocks that slumped during a widespread tech stock sell-off on Wall Street since early March.

It peaked at an all-time high of $454.98 on March 4 before falling to $326.27 last week. The stock closed at $348.49 Monday, up $2.75 per share, before Netflix released earnings after the close of trading. In after-hours trading, Netflix surged more than 6 percent to over $370 per share.

The earnings report is the company's first since cutting a deal with Comcast to guarantee the cable giant would provide fast and reliable access to its streaming content.

"In the short term, we felt like we had no choice," Hastings said.

Still, Hastings said Netflix opposes Comcast's proposed acquisition of Time Warner Cable because the combined company would have big a slice of the broadband market.